Cecilia Payne deserves to be far more famous than she is. She discovered what the stars are made of. Cecilia was born in Wendover on May 10, 1900, so she’d be 116 today. Her father died when she was just 4 years old. She won a scholarship to Cambridge university to study botany. She switched to astronomy after a year after attending a lecture by Arthur Eddington and passed her exams,…
Squee Sunday: Animals which look like food and endangered frogs
Firstly, I recommend these stunning photos of endangered frogs. Secondly, here are some bagel dogs: And some marshmallow dogs: And some muffin dogs: And finally ice-cream cats:
Writing progress
At long last I’ve been writing again. Mostly I’m polishing the whodunnit. I’ve taken James Patterson’s advice to use short chapters because he certainly knows how to write a page-turner. At first I thought the main thing would be having the extra white space, but when I came to split up my 5,000 word chapters, I realised that I still need an end-of-chapter hook every time. Short chapters means challenging…
Squee Sunday: Book day
Chan Hwee Chong designed this, along with an entire, awesome alphabet made out of books. And some quotes I’d love to put together with pictures if only I had a talent for graphic design and didn’t have three books waiting inside my my head, trying to get out. Marcus Tullius Cicero “A room without books is like a body without a soul.” Frank Zappa “So many books, so little…
Hello Canary Islands
The Canary Islands Tourist Board finally have their new blog live, complete with a post by yours truly. http://www.hellocanaryislands.com/blog/la-palma-heaven-stargazing/ They still seem to be working on links from the main site to the articles, and links between articles, but it looks pretty good to me. Meanwhile, I have another article to write.
Unconscious Gender bias part 1
I think the biggest problems women face these days, at least in western countries, isn’t in-your-face misogyny. Don’t get me wrong, there’s still quite a bit of misogyny about. See We Hunter the Mammoth almost any day of the week. But for most of us, the biggest problem is unconscious bias. Until 2011, all crash test dummies used in the USA were as tall as the average US male. Inevitably,…